At the start of the new year, former Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass quipped about the problems facing the Windy City:

If you know anything about Chicago, you know there are four critically important issues:

Crime, crime, crime, and crime.

So on Tuesday, Chicago voters will be deciding whether they want Paul Vallas or Brandon Johnson to run the city. Vallas has received the endorsement of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, as well as IL Sen. Dick Durbin and former IL Rep. Bobby Rush. Rush, a former Black Panther turned pastor, said in an ad that “Paul will invest in the South and West sides” — parts of the city awash in crime. Vallas has pledged to rebuild the ranks of the Chicago police as well as boost morale.

Consider, too, that in 2020 Brandon Johnson promoted defunding police while supporting a resolution to “redirect funds from policing and incarceration to public services …” He backed away from his defund comments, but they continue to ghost him.

Meanwhile, crime continues to wrack Chicago. Retired Sun-Times journalist Steve Huntley wrote of his former hometown:

On and on it goes, the litany of crime outrages …  It constitutes a dreary diary of a city gripped in an existential crisis threatening to deteriorate into a death spiral.

At first it seemed as if Chicagoans embraced Vallas’s pro-police, anti-crime message after his victory in the February mayoral election, taking 33% of the vote. Johnson came in second, far behind with 22%.  Voters also kicked current mayor Lori Lightfoot to the curb. Clearly Chicagoans fed up with rampant crime wanted a mayor who promised to bring order back.

So why are Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson currently in a dead heat in the runoff election polls?

Chicago Teachers Union Endorses Johnson

In the late 1990’s, Paul Vallas used his organizational skills as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools to institute meaningful changes. He not only created charter schools, but also fired poor principals, put failing schools on probation, and ended social promotion. Teachers approved him returning classroom control to them. As a result, the CPS began to improve. Vallas moved on to fix schools in other cities, including New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

On the other hand, Brandon Johnson was a former organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. And the powerhouse CTU donated over $2 million to Johnson, the former CPS teacher who in 2018 sat down for a talk with former Harvard professor Mark Warren and Bill Ayers. Yes, that Bill Ayers, the former ’60’s Weather Underground radical and Obama pal. A video of the exchange is available on YouTube, posted by Midwest Socialist, a publication of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America. That should tell you a lot right there.

In the video Johnson says this:

To be quite frank with you, I didn’t issue a lot of homework for students. That was my own way of rebelling against the structure. I don’t think I ever gave a kid an ‘F.’ I don’t know how a student sits in front of you and fails. …. I think the last thing is, it actually gave me that much more motivation to actually leave the class and become a full-time organizer with the CTU…

Meanwhile, under the dominant CTU, just 1 in 10 black CPS students can read at grade level and only 1 in 20 are proficient in math. But they sure are graduating.

Credit: Wirepoints.org.

Paul Vallas once improved Chicago Public Schools, while the CTU is destroying them. Yet the union’s clout and money may help to win the mayoral contest for Brandon Johnson. And if Johnson becomes mayor, expect an incestuous relationship between City Hall and the CTU — while Chicago’s school kids continue to pay the price.

Johnson Throws Down the Race Card

On the cusp of the election, Brandon Johnson said the quiet race part out loud:

This is about Black labor versus white wealth. That’s what this battle is about. 

Here's how Chicago Mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson is framing the election that takes place on Tuesday: “This is about Black labor versus white wealth. That’s what this battle is about.”

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) April 1, 2023

Paul Vallas didn’t say those ugly words. It was Johnson. As John Kass wrote on Sunday:

It came out in a torrent from the black leftist candidate for mayor Brandon Johnson, on the final days of the campaign, at a campaign debate.

You know that if Vallas had made a similar racist comment, the Chicago media would’ve expressed vehement outrage. But they were strangely silent. And Kass, the former columnist who understands how Chicago media operates, knows why:

It was to be studiously avoided. Why? Because there is nothing more malleable, more easily biddable than a fragile white reporter desperate to avoid the charge of racism.

And with the “black labor, white wealth” comment, Johnson threw down his race card. Race has been simmering in the background throughout the mayoral campaign, and now it’s out in the open, says Kass:

The thing to know now is that naked appeals to race have been publicly made in a campaign centering on uncontrolled violent street crime and progressive Democratic Party resistance to upholding the law. 

On April 4: Whither Chicago?

As I noted above, the four great issues facing the city of Chicago are crime, crime, crime, and crime. Follow that up with the execrable Chicago Teachers Union further destroying the education of the city’s students — especially for poor black and brown children who desperately need education — and it’s a clear choice for Chicagoans. With such a diametrically opposite choice, the race shouldn’t even be this tight.

Chicagoans can vote for Paul Vallas if they want even a gamble at reversing the future. Or they can make Brandon Johnson the next mayor and watch a once-great city continue to collapse.

Welcome, Instapundit readers! 

Featured image: compilation by Brand X Studio.